Tag Archives: user group

The power of learning from your peers

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I spent the better part of a day this week at the annual meeting of the Epic Michigan Users Group (we call it eMUG). But I don’t want to focus on Epic. I want to talk about the value of learning from your peers. It could be any vendor or any user group.

This was our fourth annual eMUG conference. Given space limitations, we had 200 attendees last year and with the venue this year we were able to accommodate 400, a significant increase. With 11 health systems in Michigan on Epic, that’s a good size group from each organization.

When asked for a show of hands on how many had been to Epic’s national user group meeting (UGM) before, only 25-30% of the attendees raised their hands. Local user group meetings like eMUG give many more staff a chance to attend and connect with their peers. National user group meetings are costly with airline and hotel expenses for a couple days.

This eMUG meeting was a content rich day: Continue reading →

User group meetings — learning from others (part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about the value of site visits as a way to learn from others. Fresh off the annual Epic User Group Meeting (UGM), I’ll call it a site visit on steroids. There are over 10,000 attendees, 100’s of educational sessions presented by users, direct access to Epic staff, and plenty of networking time; you see what I mean?

This was the first year it made sense to invite my executive colleagues from UMHS to attend. Our core Electronic Health Record is now in place, our executives need to look to the future: what else is possible with the product we already have, what new functionality is planned for future upgrades, and what other Epic users are doing.

Three UMHS executives answered my call and they were glad they did: the Hospitals and Health Centers CEO, and the executive directors of the children and women’s hospital and the adult hospital.  We will debrief as a group soon about what they saw and heard, and to explore what functionality we should prioritize next. Continue reading →